1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of network distributable imagery and more particularly to the rendering of network distributable imagery in a client-side viewer.
2. Description of the Related Art
The rapid development of the Internet has led to advanced modes of communication and collaboration. Using the Internet as a backbone, individuals worldwide can converge in cyberspace to share ideas, documents and images in a manner not previously possible through conventional telephony and video conferencing. To facilitate collaboration over the Internet, a substantial collection of technologies and protocols have been assembled to effectively deliver text, graphics, audio, video and data over the single data communications medium of the Internet. These technologies include Web browsing, application sharing, instant messaging, and Web conferencing.
In its most basic form, Web browsing involves the processing of content requests for content disposed in content servers about the Internet. Responsive to the content requests, the requested content can be forwarded to the requesting client viewers. The client viewers, in turn, can render the content for viewing by the end user. Notably, the content which is rendered in the viewer can include a mix of text, data, audio, video and graphics. Generally, the text and data portion of the content can be rendered quite quickly, while the audio, video and graphics portions of the content can require more time to download and render.
In conventional application sharing, an application host can distribute imagery of an application operating in the host to one or more application viewers distributed about the computer communications network. The imagery can include not only the screens rendered in association with the operation of the shared application, but also the visual presentation of mouse pointer movements and the like. Generally, speaking, however, the imagery can include only discrete “snap-shots” of the actual display of the operating application in the host system. In this way, the application viewers can be given the appearance of sharing an application, though each viewer merely views a shadow rendering of only a portion of the operation of the shared application.
In both the case of Web browsing and the case of application sharing, different portions of an image can be rendered at different times during the course of downloading the entirety of the image from a network source of the image. Advantageously, by viewing faster loading portions of the image before viewing slower loading portions of the image, the end user can track the progress of downloading the image. Yet, the partial display of an image can be quite distracting for many. Specifically, as new portions of the image are received and rendered, the process of rendering newly received portions of the image can cause a resizing of the image. To the extent that the end user had been viewing an already rendered portion of the image prior to the resizing, the resizing operation can displace the already rendered portion. Consequently, the displacement can be irritating to the end user.